Final part in a five-part series of All Saints' Day celebrations in New Orleans history.

November 1945: six months after victory in Europe and three months since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In New Orleans as much as elsewhere, communities recovered from four years of total war. In the weeks leading up to All Saints’ Day, preparations for those who died overseas was a topic of discussion. Many of these soldiers would not come home at all.

The American Battle Monuments Commission, which had been founded in 1923, would establish fifteen foreign monuments and cemeteries in Europe, the Pacific, and Tunisia to memorialize fallen soldiers. In April of 1945, the war department announced 5,335,500 newly available burial plots in 79 existing and new cemeteries.[1] This number seems enormous until we remember that 16.1 million Americans served in World War II. About 300,000 died in service.

Lining up at the rationing board office, Gravier Street, 1943. Photo by John Vachon, Library of Congress.

At home, New Orleans was transitioning from the frugal, rationed lifestyle of total war into a booming industrial economy. On Halloween, newspapers noted repeatedly that bedsheets, which had been rationed during wartime, would be scarcely available for children’s costumes.[2] Conversely, the enormous technological advances made during World War II in the fields of construction and finish materials reflected strongly on tomb care.[3]

​In the past, tombs were finished with limewash and patched with lime-based plaster. When the industry of military-oriented materials wound down in the mid-1940s, advances made during wartime were turned to domestic use. Latex paint, Portland-cement based concrete, and other materials.

As early as mid-October 1945, hardware stores advertised items specifically for tomb care, including “Rock-Tite cement paint, which…is waterproof, tends to seal tomb corners, and lasts for years.” In many cases these materials were ultimately harmful to soft lime-stucco and brick tombs. Yet 1945 heralded a long (and ongoing) boom of new, strong, and user-friendly materials that would widely be seen in New Orleans cemeteries.

This technological and cultural boom contrasted with some of the oldest cemeteries in the city, which were seen as outdated and, at worst, nuisances. Such was the case for Girod Street Cemetery. The Protestant cemetery, founded in 1822, had long been considered an eyesore. As early as the 1880s, the state government of Louisiana considered closing the low-lying cemetery altogether. By the 1940s, its condition was such that cemetery authorities took action.

In 1945, officials at Christ Church Cathedral conducted a survey of Girod Street – “the first Protestant burial ground in the Lower Mississippi Valley" – and concluded that “some 1000 of the old vaults and tombs in which many of the city’s prominent and wealthy families were buried are a menace to public health.[4]”

from New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 23, 1945. New Orleans Public Library.

Each of these vaults and tombs was marked on All Saints’ Day 1945, and posted with a notice to families that the tombs must be repaired within 60 days. If no action was taken, said the city public health department, the tombs must be demolished.

Reports from the sexton of Girod Street Cemetery suggested that as many as forty families did respond to the notices. However, it was too late for Girod Street Cemetery. The burial ground was deconsecrated in 1957 and demolished. The remains of white bodies were re-interred in Hope Mausoleum, and burials of African Americans were interred at Providence Memorial Park.

The tomb of Angelica Monsanto Dow once stood at the entrance of Girod Street Cemetery. Dow, who died in 1821, was a member of New Orleans' first prominent Jewish family. She converted to Protestantism after the Monsantos were expelled from Louisiana in 1769. She later returned to the city with her husband.

Providence Park Memorial to remains moved from Girod Cemetery, 1957. Photo from Nola.com.

​All Saints’ Day 1945 was, then, a pivotal moment in New Orleans cemetery history in many ways. It was the first death knoll of an oft-troubled burial ground. It was a harbinger of new technologies that would lead to the modern cemetery architecture we see today. It was also a day of profound mourning for those lost in a war finally won.

As All Saints' Day approaches, Oak and Laurel Cemetery Preservation, LLC would like to share some preservation-friendly tips for tomb and monument cleaning, care, and repair.

If you are a cemetery property owner, there are so many things you can do to help your tomb or monument last for generations. These are just some basics. As always, visit our Resources page for videos, articles, and other more in-depth information, or Contact Us for guidance with your specific tomb property. If you are ever in doubt, ask a preservationist!

Fourth in a five-part series of All Saints' Day celebrations in New Orleans history.

from the Morgan City Daily Review, October 16, 1918. Library of Congress Chronicling America.

New Orleans, along with the rest of the United States, was at war. The drafts of 1917 and 1918 would send a total of 71,000 officers and enlisted men from Louisiana to Europe to fight in World War I. On the home front, military installations were built, war bonds were purchased, and the economy boomed to meet new agricultural and industrial demands. In May 1918, Berlin Street in New Orleans was re-named General Pershing as a patriotic gesture.[1]

Although many of the dark realities of trench warfare in Europe had yet to touch New Orleaneans, some families had already felt the pain of loss. Grayson Hewitt Brown, only nineteen years old, was stationed at Camp Beauregard near Pineville. A volunteer to the 141st Field Artillery, Brown assisted health care workers during an outbreak of spinal meningitis by carrying a stricken comrade out of the camp. Days later he died of the same disease. His parents buried him in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 along the main aisle with the epitaph, “Greater love hath no man than this that a man lay down his life for his friends.[2]”

But the Great War was only one of two world-wide battles in 1918. The great influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 swept across the globe in three waves, the most pronounced of which had only begun to wane by November. Indeed, many of the young men drafted to the military in this year died of influenza before even reaching the trenches. Such was the case for Henry Philip Walter Rathke, not even 26 years old, who died in naval service in New York prior to deploying. He was also buried in Lafayette Cemetery No. 1; he left a widow and a young daughter.[3]

from the Bossier Banner, October 17, 1918. Library of Congress.

Influenza reached the United States via ports like Boston, Massachusetts, and reached New Orleans by late September. With losses of personnel to the war effort, public health officials struggled to contain the epidemic. In Louisiana, calls for nurses plastered newspapers beside advertisements for war bonds. Field hospitals were established and, notably, state and national legislative bodies banned the gathering of crowds of people for the entire month of October. This included meetings of fraternal societies, theatres, and church services.[4]

​Through the week leading up to All Saints’ Day, the forced closure of churches led officials statewide to fret about whether services for the holiday would be offered.

from flu.gov.

Only days before Friday, November 1, did the news break that services would be permitted. Even so, many churches held services outside instead. Attendance to graves in the cemeteries was noted as scarce, likely a reaction to the still-threatening epidemic.

​And yet amidst the tragedies of war and illness, one more shadow fell upon those brave enough to visit the cemeteries on All Saints’ Day. Chrysanthemums, traditional flowers for mourning and decorating graves, suffered a blight of their own in 1918.

Supply of the flowers had been thinned already by families mourning those died of influenza. By late October, chrysanthemums were advertised at $6 to $9 – $100 to $150 in present-day dollars – and sold at twice the price of roses.[5] The chrysanthemum blight was front page news, and florists noted that customers were purchasing red roses and dahlias, as opposed to the usual “dead white.”

In the next year, a third and final wave of influenza would cross the United States, as Louisiana’s enlisted men returned home from war. In 1921, a bronze flagpole was erected in Audubon Park to commemorate New Orleans Great War veterans. Yet the commemoration of those lost to war and influenza took place also in the decoration of graves on All Saints’ Days in years to come.

"The floral world will not be outdone by human beings, it would appear, and is plunged in the midst of one of the most widespread outbreaks of disease in history of local greenhouses... following out the example of human beings as closely as possible," from the Times-Picayune, Oct. 27, 1918. Image Dodd, Mead and Company - New International Encyclopedia (1923), Wikimedia Commons.

The third in a five-part series of All Saints' Day celebrations in New Orleans history.

23,707 infected. Not less than 4,600 dead. Such was the toll of the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 in New Orleans. The Crescent City was ground zero – the first point of contact in the United States for an epidemic that swelled north and eastward from July through November, taking 20,000 souls in total.

“New Orleans this year has had the blessed privilege of swelling the ranks of the Saints in Heaven." The Morning Star and Catholic Messenger, Nov. 3, 1878, p. 4. Image: St. Louis Cemetery No. 2, Square 3, by Emily Ford

Dozens of burials in each cemetery each day led one report to state that, in a sense, each day of the summer of 1878 had been All Saints’ Day. On the day of the holiday itself, many graves still retained the decorations of burial.[1] And the epidemic was not even completely over.

In the days leading up to All Saints’ Day, some health officials even cautioned against the yearly tradition of decorating and caring for loved ones’ graves. Said the Daily Picayune:

It should be mentioned… that some physicians are of the opinion that, owing to the extraordinary number of interments during the summer and the prevalence of infectious disease, it would not be safe for a general decking of graves to be carried out as on occasions of the past.[2]

"The Lost Found," from Harper's Weekly, 1866. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

On April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, ending the Civil War. In New Orleans, infrastructure and economy lay in ruin. By November, the observance of All Saints’ Day was fundamentally changed from antebellum celebrations – in fact, the way all Americans interacted with death had changed forever.

In general, nineteenth century Western culture was marked by an intimacy with death that would be incomprehensible to most modern-day people. Understanding that death could be swift and sudden, each person hoped only for a “good death” – one in which last words could be uttered, surrounded by loved ones. This ideal was sought even among soldiers, who kept letters in their pockets in case of their death, or who wrote such letters for dying friends.

Yet the horrific realities of war – and the bad death that was its companion – were unavoidable. Advances in technology led to extensive photographs of Civil War battlefields, exposing civilians to the carnage of the conflict, and “stripping away much of the Victorian-era romance around warfare.”

New Orleans was captured by Federal troops in the spring of 1862 and remained occupied through the conflict. The rites of death and burial in New Orleans were offset during this time: newspapers report fewer visitors and less ornate decorations on All Saints’ Day. Many war-related burials in the city were for Federal troops, transported to New Orleans after occupation. At the site of what is today Chalmette National Cemetery, Union soldiers, freed slaves, and African American hospital patients sought refuge. Many of these people, as well as seven thousand Confederate soldiers, would be buried in what became the National Cemetery.

Practically no system of identifying, recovering, transporting, and re-interring deceased soldiers existed during this time. For this reason, the return of dead loved ones was disorganized, belated, and often non-existent. In many cases, both Union and Confederate dead were left on the battlefield where they fell, their bones exposed for years. Said one historian:

The destruction of the Southern economy in 1865 and 1866 is unlike anything any Americans ever experienced at any other time, at least on our home soil. The writers from Northern newspapers and magazines who went South after the war end up observing open coffins laying all over the place at cemeteries. They end up seeing old men and former slaves going around collecting bones because they could get a dollar for so many pounds of bones off battlefields. Those are the bones of men who died -- without a name, a place, they were never sent back to their families. This is what people would see if they went to those battlefields in 1865 and 1866 -- and for that matter for many years afterward.

Most of the Civil War cemetery monuments we know today – the Confederate Army of the Tennessee and Army of Northern Virginia monuments, the Confederate monument at Greenwood Cemetery, the Grand Army of the Republic monument at Chalmette National Cemetery – were not erected until the 1870s and 1880s. In the years between Appomattox and the first official Memorial Day in 1868, efforts by Clara Barton and others to identify and re-locate fallen soldiers on both sides of the conflict resulted in the disinterment and reburial of thousands in New Orleans alone. However, this process would take years.

On November 1, 1865, a great many of those who would come home were not yet located or reburied. Documents state that it was a beautiful Wednesday of extremely pleasant weather. Among the notable architecture newspapers chose to highlight in this year were the tomb of the New Lusitanos Benevolent Association and the tomb of W.W.S. Bliss, both located in now-demolished Girod Street Cemetery.

The tomb of the New Lusitanos Benevolent Association long after its abandonment. Girod Street Cemetery, c. 1950s. Photo New Orleans Public Library.

The tomb of William Wallace S. Bliss was moved to Fort Bliss National Cemetery in the 1950s from Girod Street Cemetery. Photo Waymarking.com.

They also noted the then-burial site of Albert Sidney Johnston in St. Louis Cemetery No. 1. General Johnston was later re-interred in Texas:

Several soldiers in tattered gray stood around. “You served under him,” we remarked to one, as we looked at him. Tears started in his eyes as he merely said, “yes,” and pulled a twig from a cedar circlet, hanging on the grave, and handed it to us.

Other articles point out the noticeable presence of many more male attendees to ceremonies than in years past. Yet the focus of the holiday in 1865 seemed to be on the women – mothers and spouses who mourned lost soldiers. The Lusitanos tomb is described as attended by wailing women. In another account, women tend to the simple wooden monuments that temporarily marked their loved ones’ resting places:

…we came upon a number of graves, very plain and unpretending, with but a wooden foot and head board… Not one was left undecorated – not a single one without a flower, a bouquet, or a wreath to mark that some kind, gentle, amiable feminine heart had stood there to tender a memento to departed valor. Need we say whose graves they were? Need we say whose fair hands placed those mementoes there, or whose kind hearts prompted the deed? They were the same heroic women of our city who, with noiseless step and sad, earnest eye, have treaded the avenues of the hospitals during the last four years, in search of the wounded and dying soldiers… Ten of them had assembled under a lofty oak… and spent almost the entire day in preparing wreaths and decorating those humble graves.

First in a five-part series of All Saints' Day through New Orleans history

Celebrating all Saints Day, from the Times Picayune Guide to New Orleans (1904)

​New Orleans heritage is steeped in holidays and celebrations. Amidst the hedonism and mystic antics of Mardi Gras, Twelfth Night, and other festivals is the contrasting solemnity of All Saints’ Day.

Part of the Catholic calendar since the fifth century, All Saints’ Day (also known as the Feast of All Saints, Hallowmas, and All Hallows) has its origins in Roman, Germanic, and Celtic celebrations seated in prehistory. Today it is celebrated on November 1, although some Eastern Orthodox and Protestant denominations celebrate it on the first Sunday of November.

The feast day began as a holy day in which the lives of the Catholic Saints were remembered and honored. However by the time of the arrival of French and Spanish colonists to New Orleans, the day rather signified the recognition of all saints, “known and unknown,” and more generally the remembrance and communal mourning of the dead by their survivors.

By 1853, the oldest above-ground cemetery in New Orleans (St. Louis Cemetery No. 1) was 65 years old, and the imported traditions of above-ground burial and observance of All Saints’s Day enjoyed great significance in the rituals of the Catholic and Protestant communities. From the Catholic St. Louis Cemeteries to Protestant Girod Street, municipal Lafayette, and fraternal Cypress Grove and Odd Fellows’ Rest, the day was observed and reported on – not only as a day of mourning, but one of cultural spectacle, high style, and great charitable expectations.

Fashionable ladies' mourning dress, from the Godey Company Magazine, 1858.

In a city so often prone to annual epidemics, the ravage of Yellow Fever that gripped New Orleans in 1853 was horrific – 8,000 deaths were documented from the rise of the “sickly season” in May through the last throes of the epidemic in November. Nearly 5% of the city’s population had fallen, many of whom were recent Irish and German immigrants.

In the cemeteries, the death toll was at times overwhelming. On August 7, 1853, insufficient manpower and strains on resources resulted in a horrific state of affairs at the gates of Lafayette Cemeteries No. 1 and 2. The Daily Picayune lamented the following morning:

From the numerous complaints made this morning of the careless manner in which the coffins containing dead bodies are left at the Fourth District cemeteries, it would appear that there are not enough hands employed there to bury the dead. The hearses bringing them place the coffins at the gate of the cemetery, and there, it is stated, numbers of them remain for hours, and in some cases all day and all night, the effluvia given forth reaching houses four and five squares off.

… it is a sad enough necessity that we should live in the midst of an unsparing epidemic… But it should be the last reproach a city should receive, that she cannot bury her dead decently and respectably, in accordance with the feelings in which every human being participates.

To make matters worse, the redemptive first frost of autumn – that which would kill off the remaining fever-carrying mosquitoes – arrived late in 1853. By the day of All Saints’, cemetery sextons remained in struggle to inter the dead quickly.

With ever more departed loved ones to remember, New Orleaneans set out in droves to the cemeteries, carrying with them candles, crape paper, immortelle wreaths, and flowers with which to decorate graves. By the 1850s the accoutrements of mourning had cultivated their own economy. Specialized dress, decorations, accessories, and stationary were dedicated to the ritual of mourning. Such fashionable gestures were on full display on All Saints’.

Interments in New Orleans Cemeteries, October 1, 1853. From the New Orleans Daily Crescent, Oct. 1, 1853, page 2. Library of Congress.

​The devastation of the epidemic lay not only in the cemeteries, but ever more so in the homes for widows and orphans. Benevolent associations, the members of which were bonded by nationality, profession, or religion, incorporated into All Saints’ Day a tradition of charity in which the orphans of various asylums would be present in the cemetery, collecting alms to support their care.

Among these asylums was that of the Catholic orphan boys of the Third District, which cared for 300 children in October of 1853, and predicted another 100 within the next month. This institution, among others, stood present at the Catholic cemeteries on November 1, hoping for enough donations to build a new wing to accommodate their new charges.

In 1853, All Saints’ Day was on a Tuesday. Said newspapers of the day, “every avenue leading to the ‘cities of the dead’ was crowded with a dense throng of jostling pilgrims, each bending under a load of flowers, decorations and waxen tapers, or of whatever else might serve as offerings to the memories of departed kindred, therewith to decorate their tombs, and to stand as mute emblems of that hope which pierces beyond ‘the dark valley and shadow.’”

Beaded immortelle, St. Antonin's Cemetery, France, from The Art of Nothing Blog.

The Daily Crescent describes a day of crowded cemetery avenues and people of all ages, “singularities of every hue, and representing every nationality… not before midnight were the decorations complete. It was then that thousand tapers and waxen lights everywhere covering the tombs were lit up, and a light flashed over the scene, imparting to it an almost magical brilliancy.”

The night time rituals of All Saints Day are not as widely practiced in New Orleans as in the past. However, towns outside of Orleans Parish continue to decorate their cemeteries with candles. This image is from an All Saints' Day celebration in Sweden. Wikimedia Commons.

Said one author to the editors of the Baton Rouge Daily Comet of New Orleans’ All Saints’ Day observance: "Now, however, I am so much of a Catholic that I like all Saints day [sic] – I am in favor of the custom of making an annual pilgrimage to the graves of those we loved in life…” this author, signed only as “L,” describes the throngs of people, the “gaudy” decorations, the invocations of beautiful hymns.

Yet the pall of epidemic’s devastation burns through even the most endearing recollections of All Saints’ Day 1853. “L.” concludes his letter not with the solemnity of honoring the dead, but with the discussion of the recent suicide of a New Orleans lawyer:

He was buried on Sunday [October 30] followed to the grave by a large number of citizens. While the long cortege of carriages which followed his remains were passing slowly down the street to the Protestant Cemetery, another funeral came dashing along Hevia Street [now Lafayette Street], followed by a half dozen empty carriages, and all driven at a smart trot, as if in a hurry to get the dead out of sight as soon as possible. The latter procession had just time to cross the path of the former ere it came up making a forcible contrast in appearance and character between the two.

One was a rich man going to lay down in his last resting place, the other was a poor stranger hurried to his final bed. When earth has reclaimed what was of her, who will be able to distinguish the ashes of the one from the other?